Jetpack 6.9: introducing more tools for the new block editor

Another wave of blocks built for the new WordPress editor is here! Along with a streamlined admin page, Jetpack 6.9 is a serious upgrade to your website building and management tools.

New blocks

This release introduces four new blocks. Let’s see them in action!

Subscription block

Put a subscription block into any post or page so readers can subscribe to your site whenever the mood strikes them. You’ll see the Subscription block as an option in the block editor if the Subscriptions feature is active on your site.

Related Posts Block

Guiding readers to related content they might enjoy is a great way to keep them on your site. With a block, you can add Related Posts anywhere on your posts and pages — not just at the bottom.

Tiled Gallery Block

Tiled galleries give any group of images a magazine-worthy layout, and now their graphic design pop comes in block form.

Shortlinks

You’ll now spot a new Jetpack icon at the top right of your block editor. Click on the icon and you will access the post’s shortlink, that you can copy and use when sharing your posts. You will also find your Publicize options there.

Admin Page

We’ve made changes to several common admin pages that will have a big impact for both new and existing Jetpack users. It impacts multiple screens and flows:

You will notice changes when heading to Jetpack > Dashboard right after activating the plugin.

You will notice a new card when coming back to your dashboard right after connecting the plugin to your WordPress.com account.

You will notice some changes in the modals that are displayed in the Jetpack dashboard when coming back to your site after purchasing a plan.

You will find a new “My Plan” section in the Jetpack dashboard.

The sections and cards under Jetpack > Settings were also reorganized.

We’ve starting working on improving the different notices that are displayed to you when changing settings.

We’ve updated the message displayed to users who have not linked their own WordPress.com account on a site that is already using Jetpack.

And More!

As always, the full changelog offers more details on this update. If you’re ready to bring the latest version of Jetpack to your site, install Jetpack or update your existing installation right now.

There are many ways to customize related posts, including a way to filter by range indeed. You can check this page to find out. The specific filter you will be interested in is the jetpack_relatedposts_filter_date_range filter, documented here.

The new changes are really good. Although it’s not relevant to ask this question here, can you let me know a way to reduce the image file size? Already using WP Smush It plugin and Siteground webhosting.

Already using this feature and according to Google Page Speed, Pingdom, GT Metrix the site loading time is nearly 2.5 seconds and want to decrease it further by reducing the image size. For content delivery using Cloudfare too.

You can try to optimize those images further before to upload them to your site, or by uploading images that are more appropriate for the web (jpg instead of png for example, and images you’ve exported using the “for web” option in you image editor), or with a plugin like Imsanity or EWWW.

Heads Up! We need DISCORD App Icon in Social Icon Widget for Sidebar. Definitely, it will help me remove another social icon plugin and keep my database clean. Jetpack has helped me solve so many problems in one package. Kudos to Jetpack Team 🙂

Thanks for the report! That is indeed an issue with the new shortcode we’ve added to this release. We’ll get this fixed, and you can follow our progress here. Until then, you can remove that file by adding the following to a functionality plugin on your site:

I’ve used Jetpack gallery for umpteen years but this new Block version is confusing the hell out of me. So, it’s in a block, I see that I can delete an image, I can ‘upload’ a new image. But if I want to put another image into the gallery from the Media Library …. or even if I just wanted to rearrange the images …. if I click on the Edit button it takes me to the Media Library in ‘Edit-Gallery’ mode but no images appear – I I’ve waiting a loooong time just in case the network was a bit slow. Am I missing something really important? #orisitjustme
Regards … and help.

That’s indeed a known issue with the Gallery block at the moment; this happens with both Jetpack’s Tiled Gallery block and the Gallery block available with WordPress. This should be fixed in a future WordPress release, and you can follow progress about this issue here.

Many thanks Jeremy ….phew! ….. glad it wasn’t just me! Having looked at the progress page just want to raise the point that what I’m getting is NO images rather than the bug issue of displaying all media library images. Regards.

I hate the new blocks!!!!!!!! Very difficult to arrange the text the way I want it to appear. For example, a poem now puts each line in a block and when I preview my post all the lines looked double spaced instead of each stanza together.

Thanks for the feedback. The new block editor should still allow you to format your poems the way you want to.

Just like with the classic editor, if you hit “Shift + Enter” instead of just “Enter”, you will create a line break while staying in the same paragraph, and thus the same block in the new block editor. Give it a try!

So I changed the mobile view of my website and since then the stat report just stopped moving. When I switch to the default theme, it comes back but when I use the custom mobile theme, it goes off. I feel there is a code I am missing that is supposed to be in the header section of the mobile view. Please advice.

The feature should be compatible with lightboxes. If you run into some conflicts, could you contact us via this contact form with more details about your site setup, the plugins you use, and the problems you are having?

Hi Jeremy, later today I will use the contact form you mention and describe the issue in more detail.
On the CDN that should work, for now I’ll quote James Huff:

“Our image CDN is not fully compatible with all lightboxes and sliders yet. This is because we do our own re-sizing protocols that sometimes conflict with theirs. The good news is, it’s either an “it works” or “it doesn’t work” case as you’ve run into here.

In this case, I recommend disabling “Speed up image load times” at Jetpack > Settings in your site’s Dashboard.”

Need some help? You may find the answers to your questions in our Jetpack support documentation using the form above. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, feel free to contact us using the form below!

If you do not have one of the paid Jetpack plans, access to the form is indeed limited right now; it will be reopened soon. Until then, I would recommend continuing that conversation in the thread you started about this issue in the Jetpack support forums.

The related posts itself take 1 or 2 seconds to load which is hard for me to accept but on the other hand it is very useful and simple tool which I don’t want to loose. Any suggestions you like to give on speeding up example.com/post/?relatedposts=1/.